Microsoft‘s financial figures for the third quarter of 2022 are in, and the business is once again recording double-digit growth: sales of $49.4 billion and net income of $16.7 billion.
Revenue is up 18 percent, while profit is up 8 percent year on year. Microsoft attributes a portion of this quarter’s growth to the cloud, with server and cloud services revenue increasing by 29 percent, and Microsoft Cloud increasing by 32 percent to $23.4 billion.
There were lots of reasons to believe Microsoft would still be smiling this quarter. While the PC sector has begun to plummet from its epidemic highs, Chromebook sales — not Microsoft Windows machines — have been blamed for the whole recent drop.
Meanwhile, the Xbox recently had its biggest sales in 11 years, easily outselling the very limited availability of the PS5.
There were lots of reasons to believe Microsoft would still be smiling this quarter. While the PC sector has begun to plummet from its epidemic highs, Chromebook sales — not Microsoft Windows machines — have been blamed for the whole recent drop.
Meanwhile, the Xbox recently had its biggest sales in 11 years, easily outselling the very limited availability of the PS5.
Xbox hardware sales increased 14 percent, while Xbox content and services income increased 4 percent, “led by growth in Xbox Game Pass subscriptions and first-party games,” for a 6 percent increase in gaming revenue to $3.74 billion.
On the earnings call, Nadella also boasted about capturing gaming market share, claiming that 10 million people have now streamed games from Microsoft’s cloud — one of the first concrete numbers we’ve had for cloud gaming’s popularity, given that Google Stadia doesn’t share numbers and Nvidia’s GeForce Now numbers include anyone who has ever used its free trial.
PlayStation Now had 3.2 million customers as of May of last year, but Sony has opted to combine it with a larger subscription service.
Xbox Game Pass customers also played 45 percent more in the last year, according to Nadella, amounting to “billions of hours” over the course of the year.
We were also curious to see if Microsoft’s large Office and cloud businesses remained bullish as some employees returned to physical offices, and the answer is emphatically yes: 17 percent revenue growth in the “Productivity and Business Processes” segment this quarter, with Office up 12 percent and 11 percent in the commercial and consumer divisions, respectively.
Office 365 currently has 58.4 million consumer subscriptions, up 2 million from the previous quarter and 8 million from this time last year. Revenue from “Intelligent Cloud” increased by 26% to $19.1 billion.
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